Published in International Political Sociology
Presented in a photo-essay format, this article highlights the immediacy, simultaneity, and possibility of home and transnational relations. Visualizing European urban spaces as constituted by mundane migratory processes, the photo-essay recognizes the everyday struggles of people who are staying rather than moving. Attention is directed towards the discursive, affective, and material labor of grounding a migrant home. The methodological originality of the photo-essay lies in the unmuting of the scholar’s analytical voice. The photo-essay is the process and result of an interlegible dialogue between racialized others. That is to say, I combine the narrative and the visual to study a specific migrant home, and throughout this process, I reserve a voice for myself as I recount the life history of a Cape Verdean and his homemaking projects in Portugal. The visual narrative opens a window onto fieldwork dynamics and invites questions of other “other” learning.
Presentations:
African Studies Association, Chicago, December 2024.
“Doing Mobile Ethnography: Learning from the ‘Other Other’”
Early Career Scholars’ Training Workshop, Tongji University, Shanghai, May 2024.
Doing International Political Sociology (IPS) Netherlands seminars series, April 2024.
Photos taken in December 2023, Catujal, Portugal. @Kaian Lam
Kaian Lam 林嘉欣 